Most information today is stored electronically and is available on the World Wide Web. This information includes blog posts, articles (e.g., news articles, opinion pieces, etc.), research papers, web pages, and many other types of documents. While having this much information available is useful, it may be very difficult to find information relevant to a particular topic for a particular objective. Furthermore, it may be difficult to stay abreast of new information that becomes available regarding the particular topic on a continuing basis.
Search engines exist today to attempt to find documents on the web that relate to a search string input by the user. However, most search engines base their search on just the words and operators (e.g., “and”, “or”, etc.) entered by a user. When a user searches for a particular topic, the search engine will only find documents that use the entered word or words, which will lead to many relevant documents being completely overlooked. Such search engines cannot provide a good overview of the documents that surround a particular topic.
Furthermore, search engines do not provide a mechanism for assisting a user in formulating a search plan that includes detailed search parameters used to precisely define the types of content to retrieve for the user, which may then be applied on an ongoing basis to constantly monitor the World Wide Web for new information relevant to a variety of topics as defined by the search plan. Search engines require that the user specify all of the search terms and parameters for their interests. However, once a user searches for a topic, it is difficult for the user to narrow this search to a specific aspect of the topic using search terms alone. For example, a search engine may retrieve documents based on a search of a company name and this may or may not provide documents related to that company. However, focusing the documents on specific aspects of the company is not available in the search engine, as this sort of data is not stored by the search engine.
Lastly, search engines do not consider a user's objective for executing a search and thus do not help guide a user in formulating a search plan specific to their objective. Formulating a search plan is often a time consuming process and a user must execute numerous trial and error searches, review volumes of documents, and reevaluate a variety of different search plans before finding any search results that contain relevant information for their objective.